The Audiophile Next Door Shows Off His Suburban Playground of Sound

LIVING THE WIRED LIFE

AUDIOPHILE

Mike Grellman, at home with his massive vinyl collection. All photos: Brian L. Frank/Wired

Plucking an old jazz album from his imposing wall of wax, Mike Grellman points to a smoke-stained edge on the front cover. The day he bought the record, Grellman asked the store’s owner about the stains on it and a few other rare albums in the bin.

“The guy’s wife found a receipt for one of his LPs, and tried to set fire to his collection,” he says.

A Sonic Bunker

Walking through his ranch-style suburban home, Grellman starts counting off the number of doors between the master bedroom and his listening room, our destination. “One, two, three, four.” Evidently, this amount of insulation is required to keep his marriage intact. When we reach his hi-fi lair, a renovated double garage, Grellman goes into detail about how he tore apart and rebuilt the walls to create a suitable listening environment. It was unclear if he tackled this project before or after the moving boxes were unpacked.

Two speakers are centered in the room, each weighing 500 pounds and standing about five feet high. Tethered to each speaker is a thick black cable leading to twin monoblock amplifiers on the floor, each with an array of dimly glowing vacuum tubes poking out the top. These dedicated speaker amps are connected to another half dozen or so amps and preamps on shelves along the side wall, which power the turntable and other front-end components. Along the back wall are the records — several thousand of them, some rare and valuable, but many others from the dollar bins.

“Sit on the crack,” Grellman instructs me, pointing to a small couch with two cushions centered about 10 feet in front of the speakers.

Grellman is a Rolling Stones fanatic, and he leads off with a live-in-the-studio version of Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain.” Every fluctuation in Jagger’s voice and each pluck of Richards’ guitar strings sounds amazingly alive and detailed, with a deep, airy soundstage that only grows bigger as more instruments enter the mix. The system quickly sucks you in and demands your attention. It’s a far more vivid musical experience than anything I’ve encountered outside of a nightclub.

“On a late night after a bad day, with a glass of wine and good power, this reminds me of seeing the Stones in a smaller venue in 1981,” Grellman says. “You get that feeling you got, and it’s closer to that event to anything I’ve ever had. This system puts me there.”

Grellman dusts his turntable.

To amplify his point, Grellman relates a story about the time a friend brought Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top over to his house to listen to some records. When he put on an Elvis album from the early ’60s, it took Gibbons only a few seconds to hone in on the bass, and remark, “Listen to those bass lines – I played with that guy!”

The Infection

Grellman was “infected,” as he likes to say, by the hi-fi lifestyle when he was in college and wanted to set up a better rig to play his growing record collection. When he stumbled into a high-end stereo shop near his suburban Detroit home, the owner, a slick, fast-talking audio guru, bluntly informed Grellman that he couldn’t afford anything in the store. But he also took pity on the inquisitive college kid and recommended an inexpensive system Grellman could piece together without too much trouble: a $200 Dual 505 turntable, a $20 Grado cartridge, a $300 3020 NAD integrated amp, and a $300 set of Mirage SM-1 speakers. That system took Grellman through grad school, and gave him a sense of what a good system should sound like.

“That’s why I’ve got what I have now. He gave me a well-balanced, easy-to-listen-to system that put me on the right path.”

Not long after he set up his system, Grellman started dating his current wife. He says he had to make sure she wasn’t too “weirded out” by his other girlfriend, with all her cables and knobs. She wasn’t, and after college they moved out to California, where Grellman dabbled in car sales before succumbing to his hobby and becoming a writer at a pioneering hi-fi magazine called Fi. In the ensuing years, he became friends with many of the top audio equipment designers in the U.S., which allowed him to gradually collect high-end components at deep discounts.

As a kid who grew up in Detroit admiring American-made cars, it makes him happy that many of the best components are constructed stateside. “Ninety-nine percent of the best audio gear is still made here in the U.S,” he says.

If you want to be a player in today’s hi-fi scene, Grellman says that $100,000 will put you in low-end territory. If you can spend between $200,000 and $300,000, you can buy a very, very good system. And for the best of the best? A million should do the trick. Of course, spending a boatload of money doesn’t always mean you get a great-sounding system.

“A lot of times guys get designer gear, where they think they have a great systems — you know, the doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs — but you have to take the time to tune them to get a well-balanced system. Other guys go to a stereo shop and spend $250,000 and it’s just a disaster.”

When would-be audiophiles ask Grellman for advice on what components to buy, he advises them to listen for the products that “do the least damage.”

“All things have a sound, so any time you take an amp with 500 parts in the signal path, you’re listening for purity and what sounds the least affected,” he says.

Grellman scours Amoeba Records in Berkeley for gems to add to his collection.

The System

The undisputed star in Grellman’s system is his turntable, a marvel of science and engineering that was built by Andy Payor of Rockport Technologies. Based in Maine, the company has access to high-end boat builders with the expertise to craft ultra-dense enclosures out of fiberglass, carbon fiber and other materials; the better the enclosure, the less resonance and signal distortion. The turntable’s plinth (stand) weighs 120 pounds, and the platter weighs another 90 pounds. The player uses none of the belts, springs or ball bearings that most turntables employ, and is magnetically driven — its only mechanical contact is between the stylus and record.

“It floats on air, and it could be played through an earthquake,” says Grellman. “There are only about 25 of these in the world, and many consider it the best turntable ever built.”

Complementing the turntable is a pair of Rockport’s Altair Speakers, which use a 4-way driver design that include side-firing 15-inch woofers. When Grellman points to a large crack in his reinforced side wall, he comments, “You have to be careful with these woofers.”

The rest of his system looks like this:

Rockport System III Sirius turntable

Lyra Atlas cartridge

Transparent Audio cables

Aesthetix Io 3 box phono stage

Aesthetix Callisto 3 box line stage

Convergent Audio Statement amplifiers

Rockport Altair speakers

Skeptics often point to expensive cables as an example of the snake oil that’s part of the hi-fi world, but Grellman makes no excuses about the pricey Transparent Audio cables that tie his system together. While some people may not notice the difference between a simple copper wire and a $20,000 cable, Grellman says that he absolutely can in the context of his system. “As you creep up, it’s very hard to go backwards,” he says. But Grellman also concedes that you can get very good sound using copper.

Aside from exotic stereo gear and vintage records, Grellman also enjoys collecting wine, and says the two hobbies share some essential qualities.

“When you get into mega-expensive equipment, what you get is very much like wine. Say you usually drink $10-15 wines, and then you get a $25-30 bottle and it’s a little better,” he explains. “The problem is, if you start drinking those $30 bottles and go back to a $10 bottle, you notice the difference right away. And that’s the fallacy of blind A-B tests in audio — it is an acquired palette and it takes time to build it.”

The Rockport System III Sirius turntable.

Grellman says that music is never a background activity for him, and he’s on a constant quest to recreate the experience of “being in the room.”

The Wax

Like most audiophiles, Grellman feeds his system a steady diet of vinyl and more vinyl. With a record collection 40 years in the making, he now has four or five thousand LPs, although he’s lost count. He also keeps a list of 10-20 albums he’s looking for in his wallet, and appreciates the ripe hunting grounds in the Bay Area’s record stores.

As a child of the ’60s and ’70s, Grellman is partial to the classics — Stones, Beatles, Zeppelin, Floyd — and the jazz and blues pioneers who influenced those bands. Over the course of a few hours, he played a variety of music styles that crossed genres and generations, including:

Ike Quebec – “Willow Weep for Me” from It Might As Well Be Spring

Muddy Waters – “My Home Is in the Delta” from Folk Singer

Rolling Stones – “Love in Vain” from Stripped

Miles Davis – “Time after Time” from Live Around The World

Nirvana – “Lake of Fire” from Unplugged

Lyle Lovett – “She’s Already Made Up Her Mind” from Joshua Judges Ruth

Elvis Presley – “Fever” from Elvis Is Back

Fleetwood Mac – “Dreams” from Rumours

Whatever he’s listening to, Grellman says that music is never a background activity for him, and he’s on a constant quest to recreate the experience of “being in the room.” At a hi-fi conference some years ago, Grellman was checking out a cutting-edge stereo rig when his buddy noted, “that’s a really expensive system.”

“Sure,” Grellman said. “But it’s a cheap time machine.”

Living the Wired Life is a series of profiles looking at people whose passion for their hobbies borders on obsession. Be sure to read them all.

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